Say the name “Tony Benshoof,” and you’ll get admiring nods--U.S. Olympic luge team; first ever mens’ singles challenge cup gold; participating in the upcoming World Cup in Nagano, Japan; placed 4th worldwide at the 20th Winter Olympics in Torino in 2006--the list goes on. Bet you didn’t know that two days before his competition at Torino, he was submitting homework for the CDL course Communications for Professionals, part of his bachelor degree in Business Management at Empire State College. “It gives balance to my life and takes my mind off of the upcoming competition,” Tony says of his studies at CDL.

Like many CDL students who have created impressive professional careers, Tony’s life is all about balance, from types of training, to home vs. away, to career vs. academics vs. personal life. Some of the definitions of balance deal with equilibrium, stability, and the harmonious juggling of many pieces; Tony’s comments illuminate his mastery of this art.


Tony trains nine months of the year, pursuing different types of training at different times. In the off-season (June-September), he pursues weight, plyometric, balance, and agility training at least four times a week to condition his body for actually being on the ice from September through March. When he trains on ice, he may train on one of the three luge tracks in North America (Lake Placid, Salt Lake City, Calgary), or one of the other thirteen in the rest of the world. He spends the seven-eight months of training season away from his home in Minnesota, and spends at least four of those months training in Europe. Although his schedule is intense, when he’s taking CDL courses, he manages three-four hours a day of coursework as well.

Luge training itself is a balancing act for Tony, not only in the physical sense, but also in terms of balancing the actual training runs with reflection on those runs in order to perfect his technique. Tony, who has been involved with the sport for the past eighteen years and competitive for the last twelve, keeps a journal noting track temperatures, what kind of steels (runners) he used, his run times, and more, to create a record of his experiences with different tracks. That record is critically important, as he may only get a few practice runs on a track prior to competition.

Tony emphasizes that being successful at luge requires “an enormous amount of technique,” “a tremendous amount of feel on the sled that’s hard to learn unless you do it for many years” on the tracks that average about eighteen curves, each of which is crucial in a sport that’s timed to the thousandths of a second. He keeps building on his experience in a sport in which “it takes many years to become good.”


The intensity of training is why Tony heads back to Minnesota in the off season, to refresh and renew in the place in which he first started with the sport. After seeing the 1988 Olympic Luge event on television, he attended the Luge Association’s recruitment tour in Minneapolis, just because he wanted to give it a try. He was one of the approximately twenty-five children chosen to go to Lake Placid from 1500 who participated nationwide. This summer, the tour returned to Minneapolis, and Tony was able to revisit his experience, which he enjoyed very much. Eventually, Tony may settle back in Minnesota, where he may take over his father’s construction business, a goal which led him to study business management/small business/entrepreneurship as the focus of his degree.

Given his professional commitments, Tony states that he’s very fortunate to have found the Center for Distance Learning at a crossroads in his life when he needed to pursue both his education and his career. He feels lucky to have found the passion in his life, to have experienced the pride of representing his country in the Olympics, and to have been able to fit these into a well-rounded, balanced life.

For more information on Tony Benshoof, link to his website at www.tonybenshoof.com and to his pages on the NBC Torino 2006 Olympics site (which includes video clips.)